IoT: Do you want your bathroom scale talking to your refrigerator?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is in its infancy. You can buy wireless bathroom scales to upload data to monitoring tools helping you manage your weight. You can buy a connected refrigerator that keeps track of the inventory to remind you what you need to buy. It’s fascinating to think about the future of possibilities. In a recent podcast on the SAP Future of Business with Game-Changers Radio, panelist Matt Healey (Analyst at Technology Business Research) commented that he wasn’t ready for the day when his scale and refrigerator talked. He could just envision the refrigerator asking him if he really needed that cupcake, given what the scale knew.

It’s an interesting thought – our tools, machines and appliances all providing data and communicating with each other and generating data. Big data.

So where will this growth in data and information lead us? On the podcast SAP Future of Business with Game-Changers Radio with Matt, John Kreisa (VP of Strategic Marketing at Hortonworks) and Greg Smith (VP & Head of the HANA and Big Data Services Center of Excellence for the Americas at SAP) discussed “The Future of Big Customer Data: When Is Enough?”.

It’s a combination of art and science [on your big data initiatives]. It’s when you combine them both that you find the most interesting piece of it. Good scientific rigor to look at things, but you also have to color outside the lines. It’s those two things combined that will give you the most insight, the most value.Matt Healey

Do we need to become data hoarders?

At Hortonworks we see customers who are looking for a cost effective, scalable solution to their problem. Hadoop allows customers keep many types of data without a massive investment in software and hardware. With Hadoop, we believe that companies can start small with a single application built to address one use case and then evolve their architecture to encompass a data lake. Hadoop provides a cost effective data platform to keep all types of data which allows your data and business teams to experiment and find new business value. As Matt Healey said in the podcast, companies need to use both science and art to find the value. And it’s key that the business and technical teams work together in order to find the context in the big data.

Companies want to be smarter with their data. They don’t want to be just lucky that they had a transaction, they had someone click on their website or lucky that discovered a piece of machinery needed maintenance before it broke down. They want to use the vast amounts of data and they ways they interact with their customers to be smarter and to do a better job at that.John Kreisa

What’s next?

It’s easy to experiment with small samples of data. SAP has multiple products that connect with Hadoop and you can find evaluation licenses of:

And you can easily experiment with Hadoop using the Hortonworks Sandbox that is a single node Hadoop environment.

SAP does Hadoop with Hortonworks

SAP and Hortonworks have a special relationship. SAP is able to resell the Hortonworks Data Platform and secure Hortonworks Hadoop experts to support your Big Data initiatives. Need help to move your Big Data initiatives forward? If you’re an SAP customer, you can contact your SAP sales rep. SAP can assist in the planning, acquisition, implementation and ongoing support, including the Hortonworks Data Platform.

We’re amazed at the predicted growth in data. But what we’re going to be even more amazed by the things that people do with that data. There are going to be companies that are adept at dealing with it and those companies who deal with it more urgently that are the next Fortune 500.Greg Smith

Related Pages

Build a Modern Data ArchitectureApache Hadoop is a core component of a modern data architecture, integrating with and complementing your existing systems to create a highly efficient, highly scalable way to manage all your enterprise data.